WHAT ABOUT THE LOVE PART?

Another woman hooks up with all the wrong men, in linked stories from a fresh new voice.

Although the jacket copy would have us believe that our protagonist, Abby Hillman, is a smart woman who just chooses the wrong guys, there’s little in the collection to prove she’s anything but average. But it’s Rosenfeld’s decision to make her so—as opposed to the more common diamond-in-the-rough type—that lends interest to this intermittently impressive volume. In the first story, “Good for the Frog,” Abby talks about her last bad relationship, doing so with her long-distance friends Sarah and Jasper. She’s a needy mess but manages to slip in a good deal of self-deprecating asides. That story doesn’t prepare us for the body of “What About the Love Part?,” however, where we discover that Abby isn’t just clueless about love, but she’s got a child, Katrin, with an ex-husband and seems to be drifting slowly into a numbed loneliness. The most painful pieces take up her relationship with Stephen—a scathing caricature of a maddeningly self-involved itinerant writer—and their seemingly interminable rafting trips in the West (white-water rapids play far too large a role here). By the close, Abby’s life has come to seem almost hopeless: friends drifting away, romantic prospects nil, she herself exhibiting increasingly neurotic and fretful behavior. While there is little of the redemption here that readers may look for in tales of hapless heroines, Rosenfeld nevertheless makes her character convincingly real, which may, after all, be the more important thing.

Taken individually, most of the stories are too wispy to be memorable. Still, together they form a quick, seamless arc that ends in graceful, lonely quietude.